Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump has threatened revenge against his political opponents, as The New York Times has extensively reported. And although he has denied it, Trump’s key ally in this planned assault on political adversaries and government institutions is the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, a detailed manifesto for taking away our democratic freedoms. As the Times has also reported, the links between Trump and Project 2025 are too numerous to be denied or minimized.
To carry out this plan, Trump would fire government professionals and replace them with Heritage-vetted Trump worshipers. His administration would use the power of the federal government to prosecute and jail educators and librarians, local district attorneys, state and local public servants, university professors, businesspeople, medical staff, and private employers for supposed crimes ranging from distributing “pornography” to upholding social justice in the workplace and providing reproductive healthcare.
Project 2025 would also nationalize the prosecution of teachers and librarians for allowing their students and patrons to read texts the right does not agree with. In his Project 2025 foreword, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts threatens to prosecute and jail educators and librarians who assign “pornographic” materials. Roberts would have teachers and librarians carry the designation of “registered sex offenders” for the rest of their lives. (By “pornography,” Roberts is referring to any book that touches upon human sexuality or LGBTQ+ themes.)
The American Library Association (ALA) has documented the top ten most challenged books in the country—all of which are claimed to be “sexually explicit.” This list includes The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Seven of the books were also banned for LGBTQIA+ content. Overall, ALA found that 4,240 different book titles were targeted for censorship in 2023.
Extremist groups including Moms for Liberty, which is allied with the Heritage Foundation and Trump, led the charge to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, and And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins who adopt an orphaned baby penguin. Legislation to prosecute teachers and librarians for engaging with these types of books has already passed in many Republican-dominated states.
When he defeated a book-banning candidate in a 2023 Virginia state senate race, Schuyler VanValkenburg framed the issue as a matter of freedom. “As a high school teacher,” he said on Twitter/X, “I know the difference one book can make for a child. We need to protect our public schools from the extremist book banning that my opponent’s legislation enables.”
Project 2025 threatens every institution that conducts efforts to provide equity and opportunity to all Americans. It declares, “The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.”
Our nation’s unsteady progress in addressing our history of racism and prejudice has been dependent on affirmative steps taken by our institutions to remove systemic barriers to inequality. Project 2025 would investigate, prosecute, and jail state and local officials, business leaders, and higher education administrators and professors for bringing a measure of fairness to their agencies, schools, and businesses.
Project 2025 promises to bring federal prosecutorial power to “jurisdictions with rule-of-law deficiencies.” It targets “left” localities, meaning places where the right disagrees with local district attorneys’ legal interpretations on issues regarding race and gender.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has already acted on this plan and replaced elected district attorneys in two Florida counties.
Project 2025 also attacks abortion rights. “Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” it reads.
The organization Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD) says this passage refers to an 1873 law called the Comstock Act, which has never been interpreted to prohibit using the postal service to send items for a lawful purpose. LDAD concludes that the Project 2025 re-interpretation of this act means the federal government would “prosecute people if they mailed FDA-approved abortion medicines, even to states where abortion is legal. This would effectively institute a national abortion ban.”
Roberts told The New York Times, “We want Schedule F,” which is an initiative that would allow the President to fire up to 50,000 civil service professionals with years of government experience and replace them with Project 2025’s handpicked MAGA disciples. President Trump issued an executive order to implement Schedule F in October 2020, but President Joe Biden reversed it.
No wonder Trump denies knowing anything about Project 2025—its policies are broadly unpopular. But after taking a private flight to a Heritage event in 2022 with Roberts, Trump told the crowd of the yet unreleased Heritage project, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, wrote what the New Republic called a “violent foreword” to Roberts’s book on Project 2025.
Project 2025 will rob Americans of our freedoms. If Donald Trump is elected, we won’t be able to build new prisons fast enough.